★ 03/27/2023
Journalist Branigan debuts with a visceral history of the Cultural Revolution and a probing look at how the modern-day Chinese Communist Party has sought to erase this chapter from its past. Lasting from 1966 to 1976, the upheaval saw children condemning their parents for “thoughtcrimes,” and students, some as young as 13 or 14, attacking and murdering their teachers. As many as two million people were killed. Young reactionaries, who called themselves Red Guards, perpetrated these atrocities to glorify the teachings of Chairman Mao Zedong, who used the tidal wave of violence to strengthen his leadership position and silence domestic critics. The chaos touched almost every Chinese family, including that of current president Xi Jinping, who “was exiled to a long stretch of bleak rural poverty” after his father was persecuted by Chairman Mao. Though the Cultural Revolution was declared a historical catastrophe in 1981, no one was held responsible and there was no closure for the victims. Drawing on fascinating and often wrenching interviews with victims and perpetrators, Branigan reveals the speed with which “beatings and deaths became commonplace” and makes a persuasive case that the period is an unresolved national trauma lying just beneath the surface of modern China. This is essential reading for China watchers. (May)
"Unfailingly acute, exceptionally humane—a masterpiece."
"Tania Branigan’s prose is masterful and crystalline. It feels as if Joan Didion turned her powers of observation on China. Red Memory is the kind of book capable of altering your understanding of an unforgettable episode that is not a strange artifact of history but, rather, an urgent warning about our deepest, most durable frailties."
"Red Memory ... uses China’s Cultural Revolution as a timely template for an accessible exploration of what societies choose to remember, how they choose to remember it, what they decide to forget and why it is important. Beautifully written and sensitively reported."
New Statesman - Gary Younge
"Branigan’s book offers an equally important cautionary lesson: the perils of ignoring or distorting history. What a country downplays in its historical record continues to reverberate, whether it’s the Cultural Revolution in China or the treatment of Native Americans and the legacy of slavery in the United States."
New York Times - Pamela Paul
"Branigan expertly documents both the power and the frailty of memory in the face of an unrelenting campaign by the Chinese Communist Party to bend and twist people’s recollections into whatever shapes best suit the CCP in the present…. Literature on the Cultural Revolution is a saturated market, but only rarely does it convey as Branigan does the continuing hold of that decade on a people otherwise transformed by economic development, technological progress, and newfound social and physical mobility."
Foreign Affairs - Mary Gallagher
"This is a beautifully written and thought-provoking book."
"This book is thoroughly deserving of prominence. It is complex … because so is China."
Sunday Times - Max Hastings
"[An] absorbing study of the legacy of the Cultural Revolution."
Air Mail - Avro Chakraborty
"A breathtaking work."
"[T]he past, as Ms. Branigan shows in this evocative book, is not so easy to suppress."
Wall Street Journal - Stephen R. Platt
"What makes Branigan’s account special is captured in a line at the end of her work: ‘This book could not be written if I were to begin it today’…. Amid the growing difficulties of accessing lived experiences in China, Branigan’s lyrical style of writing lends itself well to intimate encounters with interviewees.… Her humanising approach to writing about China is particularly valuable amid our current polarising geopolitical narrative, which loves strong lines between enemies and allies. It is also appropriate for capturing a decade in which the line between hunter and hunted shifted with the political winds of the day."
Financial Times - Yuan Yang
★ 2023-01-05Guardian explores the “cumulative forgetting” of the devastations of the Cultural Revolution.
London-based journalist Branigan, who lived in China from 2008 until recently, delivers a series of poignant, engaging stories that reveal the deep scars left by the Cultural Revolution, which radiated violently across the country from “Red August” 1966 to 1976. Across a beautifully rendered text, the author astutely examines the Maoist ideology that drove the tumultuous class struggle and destruction, leading to the deaths “of as many as 2 million for their supposed political sins and another 36 million hounded.” Prompted to explore the history more deeply after viewing artist Xu Weixin’s exhibit of huge portraits in Beijing of those who “had played a part in this madness, as victim or perpetrator; often both,” Branigan digs into numerous vivid personal tales. Many were teenagers at the time, and some were children of the political elite; they responded to Mao’s direct appeal to “be martial” by becoming zealous devotees of the Red Guard. They inflicted violence on their teachers and denounced their parents, all in the name of destroying the “Four Olds”—old ideas, old culture, old customs, old habits. Many of the perpetrators, including current leader Xi Jinping, would later be disgraced themselves, sent to reeducation camps in rural communities for years afterward. Only Mao’s death and the ousting of the Gang of Four would end the mayhem. Throughout this sensitive, well-researched narrative, Branigan delicately delves into these shattered lives. Many of her subjects are still searching for justice or recognition, while others remain nostalgic for their patriotic youth. The author notes that while the hysteria and fanaticism of the time “forged modern China,” the events are rarely discussed today—even as the trauma continues to resonate deeply.
A heartbreaking, revelatory evocation of “the decade that cleaved modern China in two.
"A veritable masterwork."
"Very good and very instructive. It’s Mao’s Cultural Revolution revisited with all the pain and agony that went with it."
Observer - Margaret Atwood
"An exercise in attempting the impossible, of trying to reconstruct what it was like to live through and then live with one of the most brutal periods of modern Chinese history. Branigan comes closer to doing so than anyone else has in the English language."
"[An] absorbing study of the legacy of the Cultural Revolution."
Air Mail - Abhrajyoti Chakraborty
"Without understanding the Cultural Revolution and its long-term influence, it is impossible to understand today’s China. I hope that all China experts, policymakers, think tankers, and the public perceive this and read Red Memory ."
"[A] penetrating study of the buried stories of the Cultural Revolution of 1966 to 1976."
"Tania Branigan offers nuanced, humane portraits of people whose lives were transformed by those years, and also teaches the reader much about the politics of memory."
"Red Memory shows how the psychic wounds of Mao Zedong’s decade of madness endure to this day, replicating themselves through the generations."
"Branigan weaves fascinating, unbelievable, and often terrifying personal narratives into her analysis. Her deep insight into a nation's painted-over trauma explains how mass hysteria, rampant betrayal, and even cannibalism have shattered a society for generations afterwards."
"[E]xceptional…offers insights at once deep and clear into universal and timeless questions—of memory and forgetting, of horror and what it takes both to survive it and inflict it. It is haunting, evocative, and written with an almost painful beauty. I cannot recommend it too highly."
"Stunning, profound and gorgeously written, Red Memory is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding China today."
Minneapolis Star Tribune - Patricia L. Hagen
"Red Memory will tell you more about Xi Jinping’s rule than any tome on economics."
"Branigan’s book is investigative journalism at its best, its hard-won access eliciting deep insight. The result is a survey of China’s invisible scars that makes essential reading for anyone seeking to better understand the nation today."
Guardian - Marina Benjamin
Mao Zedong's ten-year Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) forever changed Chinese society and family structure. With a deliberate, evenhanded delivery, Asian American narrator Rebecca Lam traces the origins and repercussions of the attempt to purge bourgeois and capitalistic thoughts and tendencies from hundreds of millions of Chinese minds. A million people died, millions more were jailed, and thousands of churches and cemeteries were looted and destroyed. There's a feeling of sadness and disbelief in Lam's voice as she describes children betraying parents, gangs of students beating citizens in the streets, and the capricious political demands that just kept changing. The author reports that the Chinese people have attempted to forgive and forget, but the memories of those cruel times remain vivid and relentless. B.P. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine
